New ‘Transformers’ Trailer Rewrites Moon Landing History

angchen

Movie TalkJanuary 13, 2011

Director Michael Bay Paramount Pictures

Apparently, all the greatest endeavors in human history have been to hide the existence of Transformers.

In the first "Transformers," they said that the Hoover Dam was built to hide the All Spark cube that landed on Earth. And in the second movie, "Revenge of the Fallen," it was revealed that one of the Great Pyramids housed a doomsday device that had the power to destroy our sun. Now it turns out that our entire space program in the 1960s was just a cover to investigate a massive alien spacecraft that crashed on the dark side of the Moon.

Paramount Pictures just released the first look at next summer's "Transformers: Dark of the Moon," director Michael Bay's third and apparently final film with the robots in disguise. According to the trailer, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were in radio silence on the Moon's far side, they engaged in a secret mission to check out the giant Transformer lying dormant on the surface.

I got the chance to meet with Michael Bay earlier this week at his offices in Santa Monica, and he said that he actually consulted with Buzz Aldrin about his experience as the second man to walk on the Moon. He told Bay stories about the Apollo 11 mission and how they had to abandon all their unnecessary equipment there so their capsule was able to make it back home. Bay said that after speaking with Aldrin, "I definitely know they landed on the moon now. I knew it was real, just by studying actors." Apparently, Bay can tell a faker when he sees one, and in his eyes Aldrin is the real deal.

Bay also said that it was his personal interest in space that was the genesis of the film's story. Knowing that Bay was fascinated with NASA -- the director shot part of "Armageddon" at the Kennedy Space Center -- screenwriter Ehren Kruger used the Moon landing as a jumping-off point for his script.

The footage from the trailer will be in the movie, according to Bay. It wasn't created only for the teaser. But he emphasized that the visual effects aren't finished yet. "[We] still have 'turkey shots' in there," Bay said. "That's what we call them. They've got a long way to go." Bay did admit, that the shot in the trailer of the pen floating in zero-gravity was done through special effects. He didn't film in a zero-G plane like Ron Howard did for "Apollo 13."

If you want to see the trailer in 3D -- the shot at the end where the camera flies inside the robot's eye is especially impressive that way -- it should be playing before "The Chronicles of Narnia" this weekend and "TRON: Legacy" next week."Transformers: Dark of the Moon" arrives in theaters on July 1, 2011.